Ottawa Sun: editorial
November 13, 2005

It’s always galling when a government-owned monopoly announces fat profits, particularly when we have all had to share the financial pain to get it to that stage.

But there was Ontario Power Generation Inc. as last week ended ─ the company that supplies about 85% of all electricity consumed in Ontario ─ boasting that it had posted a whopping third-quarter profit of $181 million. That was a marked turnaround from last year when the provincially-owned power generator reported a loss of $15 million in the same June-September period.

"Our third quarter financial results reflect higher realized electricity prices as well as increased production, compared to the third quarter of 2004," said OPG president and CEO Jim Hankinson.

"Our year-to-date 2005 earnings exceed 2004 earnings for the same period and we expect this trend to continue to the end of 2005."

No kidding. And we all have the power bills to show us where the money’s coming from.

As high as our bills have already been, though, we haven’t seen anything yet, says Tom Adams, executive director of Energy Probe. "There’s going to be sticker shock."

Adams is on record as predicting that over the next two years, overall electricity prices in Ontario, including the cost of transmission, will rise by 25%.

We’re not going to suggest that our Crown corporations ─ whether at the federal or provincial level ─ should not be run in a businesslike manner. In fact we wish that governments as a whole would adopt that mantra.

But it seems that the purveyors of power are dealing from a stacked deck when a provincially-run company has a slate of customers that have nowhere else to turn for their supply, and the province gets to determine how much we pay.

Reporting a profit under those circumstances is rather like our federal government bragging that it has a budgetary surplus, but then continuing to tax us as if it were still trying to pay down the deficit.

It’s time that governments at all levels recognized that virtually every penny of the money they take in comes from the same people ─ individual Canadians and businesses ─ and that the more they snatch out of our pockets the less we will have to spend.

In recent years it has been consumer spending that has kept the Canadian economy buoyant. We like having our own money to invest in homes and cars and furnishings and all the other conveniences of modern life.

We spend, stores and manufacturers sell, restaurants and cafes open and prosper and the whole tax base expands. That in turn means that everyone ─ governments included ─ prospers.

Why is that such a tough concept for governments to understand?

And another thing . . .

Prime Minister Paul Martin must have thought he was back at the Parliamentary Press Gallery dinner and it was time to go gunning for laughs when he told reporters the other day that he refused to "play politics" in the face of a plan by his political opponents to force a federal election early next year.

Yes, this would be the same Paul Martin that warned that an election now would derail plans to fund improvements on Native reserves, fix medicare and save the climate. What a kidder.